Printed documents have been a primary source of communication for many centuries. Printed documents have been used widely across different domains such as in news reporting, advertising, office environments (large and small offices alike) and so on. The last decade has witnessed an explosion in popularity of mobile hand-held devices such as personal digital assistants, smart phones and more recently tablet devices. The ubiquitous nature of print media and ever increasing popularity of the mobile hand-held devices have led to a new genre of applications based on augmented reality.
Augmented reality (or AR) is a view of a physical world where some elements of physical reality are augmented by computer generated inputs such as sound, graphics and so on. Due to vast improvements in processing power and other capabilities, the hand held devices are now able to host augmented reality applications. Such host augmented reality applications enable an end-user to retrieve additional information related to a captured image of a real world object using a camera connected to a device (e.g. a camera phone) and to augment the additional information to a real world object. Such a real-world object may be a natural image in a document, a piece of textual information, a physical object such as a printer and so on. In addition to hand-held devices, several other devices such as head-mounted displays, and heads-up displays (such as in a car) are also gaining popularity for hosting augmented reality applications.
One method of displaying augmented reality content increases the amount of augmented reality content displayed when a person stares at an object for an extended period of time.
In another method of displaying augmented content, augmented reality content is customised by varying opacity of the augmented reality content presented to a user according to the amount of time that the user has spent viewing the content.
However, the above methods can confuse a user as content varies while the user is viewing the content.
Thus, a need exists to make an augmented viewing experience better for a user.